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They don't need to shoot down all of them to carry out an operation. Losses greater than zero are acceptable.
I was speaking more generally regarding the whole war, but in this specific instance "losses greater than zero" very quickly complicate things and expand the operation. Unless the HEU is secretly stored closer to the border than publicly indicated, you're looking at 200+ miles of contested airspace, transporting in and out. Every piece of essential equipment or personnel you lose now needs a backup, which balloons the size of the operation, makes it harder to transport and protect, and increases the number of targets that can be hit. So you need more protection, which increases the footprint to be transported and protected, etc.
The US has air superiority. But yes, it would be a big operation. I believe the US certainly has the capability to do it, though.
And if the recent public speculation that the material was moved to Ishafan is true, the stuff is just in intact tunnels covered with soil and not really deeply buried.
no, the US doesn't have air superiority over Iran and rarely, if ever, flies into Iranian territory due to the risk of their planes being shot down
if it had air superiority, you would see the US regularly flying into Iranian territory to use far cheaper and more destructive bombs, but they rarely if ever do that because they would lose even more planes than their 1 plane loss every day and a half or so
Iranians are complaining that the US is dropping mines in Shiraz, about a hundred miles inland. As far as I can tell, these air-dropped mines don't even have wing kits so their range is very limited. Here's pictures of Israeli F-16s (not stealthy!) kitted out with cluster bombs, which likewise are not short ranged weapons. Here's the DVIDS link to images from Epic Fury, and here's a B-52, an F-18, an F-16, and an F-15 loaded up with gravity bombs.
You can of course wave away the DVIDS photos as head-fakes but when combined with the mines it seems pretty reasonable to believe that the US is doing strikes inland.
The only evidence here is the mines picture and post which I'll have to look into, the random pictures in random anywhere of some planes loaded with gravity bombs doesn't mean much and you trying to pass it off that it does makes me skeptical of you in general.
I didn't write the US doesn't strike inland nor did I write US planes have never crossed into Iranian territory, I specifically left that open as a possibility. What I wrote was the overwhelming vast majority of strikes use stand-off munitions. The US is obviously using MQ-9 Reaper drones and some other drones in Iranian territory, many of which are armed and are attacking cardboard trucks, paintings on the ground, and probably some real military targets. We know this because we've seen pictures of them posted and published many times. When it comes to manned aircraft, however, we see none of those photos anywhere but the extreme outliers of Iranian territory. It wouldn't surprise me if US planes very briefly cross into Iranian territory to drop bombs near the borders or coastlines, but I've seen nothing to think it's a regular occurrence or deep penetration of Iranian territory happens ever.
When it comes to Russia in Ukraine, we see this all the time and have seen it for years at this point. Russian helicopters are regularly prowling Ukrainian territory and are photographed constantly. That's what something akin to air superiority looks like, not what the US is currently doing. The US could do that and they likely will as they run out of ammunition, but it will require much higher risk tolerance and will result in many more planes being shot down.
This isn't how evidence works. The photos I posted are evidence, they are just not necessarily conclusive evidence (as I myself pointed out).
There are other, non-conclusive reasons to think that the US is using gravity bombs well inland. For instance, WSJ is reporting that the spectacular strikes on Isfahan last night were reportedly carried out using 2,000-pound gravity bombs, likely from B-2s. Hesgeth announced that we are sending B-52s on overland strikes.
I would like to see photos of MQ-9s operating over Iran from the last month, please link.
The fact that we aren't seeing cell phone photographs of tactical aircraft that can operate at night and cruise at tens of thousands of feet from a country with an internet blackout doesn't really mean much.
Check your camera roll: do you have any pictures of airliners cruising at 40,000 feet? If you do, they are almost certainly from the contrails, and you can almost certainly barely make out the airliner. Now imagine an aircraft that is smaller and faster at a similar altitude taking deliberate steps to avoid leaving a contrail. If someone did post pictures of them, you would dismiss it as having less evidentiary value than all of the other pictures I flagged for you, and I wouldn't blame you! Unless you have specialized equipment, you really won't catch meaningful pictures of aircraft operating at altitude.
This is doubly true if they are operating at night, which they may be primarily for the deep strikes, particularly against fixed targets.
You might be correct that most US strikes are using standoff munitions. I doubt this - at this point, given the reported sortie tempo, I suspect most strikes are using gravity bombs, although we might have an interesting discussion as to whether or not e.g. the JDAM-ER is a gravity or standoff weapon. But if you are correct, I do not think it would be because your timeline isn't flooded with pictures of US jets doing strafing runs over Tehran.
Why would the US send helicopters to do a job that tactical fixed winged aircraft can do better at less risk? Not only are rotary assets vulnerable to pretty much everything bigger than a handgun, their short range and (typically) lack of in-flight refueling mean that they would not be able to reach as far inland as tactical jets, and they would need to be based closer to Iran, making them even more vulnerable to being hit on the ground than fixed-wing aircraft are already (although expeditionary basing might counterbalance this), and they use smaller munitions with less range than US fixed-wing assets can use. The Russians have lost massive amounts of helicopters and attack aircraft tearing around at low altitude doing rocket runs for precisely these reasons. At least the Russians have a target list (mechanized formations) that helicopters are suited for; helicopters aren't really particularly well suited to find ballistic missile launchers or to hit hardened targets.
Technically, the definition of air superiority is "That degree of dominance in the air battle of one force over another which permits the conduct of operations by the former and its related land, sea and air forces at a given time and place without prohibitive interference by the opposing force" and air supremacy as "That degree of air superiority wherein the opposing air force is incapable of effective interference" (page 2). I think the US has met the terms of not only air superiority but also air supremacy: Iran's opposing air force is incapable of effective interference. Both definitions are focused on the air battle. For the sake of argument, I suppose we could grant the US air supremacy (since the Iranian air force is not contesting the battlespace) but not air superiority, which would be an odd conclusion.
In contrast, Russia still has to deal with the Ukrainian Air Force, although I think they have have, at a minimum, achieved a "favorable air situation" (page 5).
Do you think the US didn't hit Iranian enrichment facilities in Fordow and Natanz with gravity bombs last year, or do you think that Iranian air defense effectiveness has increased since then, despite a month of attacks on their air-to-surface weapons? Would those strikes not count as a "deep penetration" of Iranian territory?
To clarify a bit, my own belief is that the US believes it can deploy gravity bombs from tactical jets at acceptable risk over some portion of Iran, and is acting on this belief by doing so. Exactly what portion of the country is unclear to me, although it likely depends on the airframe. I do not believe the risk of operating over ~any portion of Iran has been reduced to zero and it would not surprise me if there were still portions of Iranian territory that were considered too risky to deploy gravity bombs against. However I do suspect that at this point in time more low-end weapons (e.g. JDAMs) are being employed offensively than high-end stand-off weapons (e.g. JASSM).
Evidence is something, if true, makes something else more or less likely. In my example, the more or less likely is whether or not the US is penetrating Iranian territory regularly and dropping gravity bombs regularly in Iranian territory. I don't doubt American planes carry gravity bombs on any given day. Random pictures in random places of American planes at random times carrying gravity bombs doesn't make this more or less likely and is therefore not evidence of this specifically. That is how evidence works.
Attempting to portray this as "not conclusive evidence," as opposed to barely evidence of that specific fact I'm disputing at all is rhetorical trick to imply it's even in the same zipcode of conclusive evidence when it's not remotely close to it. Throwing in a bunch of pictures of something I don't dispute to attempt to tie that together with the one actual picture which may be decent evidence, once vetted, is another trick to make readers believe it is a stronger case than it is because, look, you've shown 3 true things and 1 maybe thing instead of just the 1 maybe thing.
And this is pretty much an accurate characterization of the rest of your post. It's either something I didn't write which I'm not going to correct again (I plainly do not accept you believe I implied only cellphone photos of aircraft flying at nighttime would show manned US aircraft are penetrating Iranian airspace regularly) or attempting the sorts of rhetorical tricks I described above which I find to be dishonest and perhaps I am too sensitive and being unfair.
I appreciate the time you spent typing out this response and I did read the whole thing and it does have some good points, but I just don't care to have these sorts of sprawling dialogues bickering about facts. I'm not going to peruse through the mostly telegram coverage I follow to find pertinent photos from weeks ago and I am regularly annoyed at the effort differential between people repeating what they read in the wallstreet journal or one of the first 5 things which appear on a basic google search and me spending far more effort to re-find and post vetted photos from telegram bros I trust.
Fair enough, I suppose. I'd still like to see that picture of the MQ-9 over Iran, and I will trade you this picture the Twitter OSINT guys geolocated today, pinpointing this B-52 carrying gravity bombs over Saudi Arabia.
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